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Who owns the stories from the "margins of the margins:" When culture-centered articulations collide with the status quo



In culture-centered processes of social change, communities at the "margins of the margins" narrate their stories as the anchors to organizing for structural transformation. 

The power of the CCA lies in the centering of these stories as the sites of change, with the sovereignty over the stories held by communities at the "margins of the margins." 

This process of sovereignty turns to the question, for what purposes are the stories being narrated. For advisory groups of community members at the "margins of the margins," the ownership of the stories is the basis for change. 

These stories are mobilized to organize for structural transformation.

When the problems identified by advisory groups of community members at the "margins of the margins" intersect with those occupying positions of power, they often unsettle these power structures. When the solutions created at the "margins of the margins" make their way into power structures, they are often undermined. The work of undermining community framing of problems and solutions often takes the form of erasing the agency of the community. How would the community really know? How can the community "really" create the solutions? Do they even know the evidence and the science? These are the usual questions asked by those in positions of power.

In the work of CARE, these collisions between solutions voiced by communities at the "margins of the margins" and those inhabiting power structures become distinctly visible when communities at the "margins of the margins" meet the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sector or state bureaucrats. This collision renders visible the tenuous communicative inversions that hold up the engagement industry. Hegemonic states and neoliberal NGOs all want to engage, re-working the engagement to serve their hegemonic interests. 

The typical response of NGOs and bureaucrats in undermining community solutions is constituted amidst the theft of stories voiced by communities at the "margins of the margins." 

Even as NGOs and bureaucrats actively undermine community-led solutions, they do so through the co-optation of community stories. These stories are extracted to decorate colorful brochures and video products that project the image of engagement. The stealing of community stories, divorced from community ownership of solutions, is integral to the perpetuation of the engagement industry in the service of neoliberal capital.

NGO actors, often performing marginalized identities to craft common threads with communities at the "margins of the margins," will then claim, "these are our stories" to carry out the theft. For instance, the recruitment of a token BIPOC person into the hegemonic NGO sector is integral to the work of laying claim to stories from the "margins of the margins" by NGOs as our own. This co-optation of transformative community voices by professionalized NGOs is integral to the perpetuation of the status quo that underlies the marginalization of communities.

The transformative work of the CCA is rooted in safeguarding against the theft of community stories, to stop the ongoing piracy that is often ironically carried out by the settler colonial state through the co-optation of indigenous peoples and peoples of colour. It is here that community researchers, activists, advocates, and academics working with the CCA will have to continually agitate to ensure that it is the solutions voiced by and at the "margins of the margins" that are foregrounded as drivers of structural transformation, and not decontextualized stories lifted from community life by NGOs and bureaucrats to serve the market-driven expansionary logics of settler colonialism.

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